


Bewitch Me

by text_orc



Category: Original Work
Genre: Consensual Mind Control, Consensual Non-Consent, Consensual Possession, Dubious Consent, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:07:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27761974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/text_orc/pseuds/text_orc
Summary: A religious cult survivor seeks a way to bypass his mental block against intimacy, with a little help from his nonbinary witch partner.
Relationships: Bracken Halfmoon / Osili Mackowle
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Bewitch Me

“Have you ever, er, possessed someone?”

I spluttered into my teacup. I had grown accustomed to Osili asking me odd questions at the supper table, but this was leftfield even for him.

“My apologies, Bracken, is that hot-path?” he added quickly, a note of panic rising in his throat. “I’m so sorry, I never meant to, _one questions not the Dogma nor the –_ ”

“No, no!” I held up a hand. “It’s okay. It’s fine to ask, remember?”

Osili nodded and took some deep breaths to steady his soul. These moments were frustrating for the both of us, but I could hardly blame him for being cautious. This time last year, asking the wrong questions could’ve cost him his dignity, or worse.

“Do you still want to hear the answer, Sil?” I asked.

Sometimes he didn’t, but this time he nodded. “Aye,” he said. “I do. Let me ask again…” He gathered himself up, straightened his back, and spoke again, words surer this time. “Bracken, have you ever possessed someone?”

When he mustered his confidence like this, his stance strong and unyielding, I couldn’t help but grin. Osili was _huge_ , tall enough to crack his head on my low ceiling and strong enough to break plenty more of my furniture while he was at it.

“Kind of,” I said.

“You have?” said Osili, leaning back in the new chair we’d made for him together – orangewood, reinforced with slivers of his old armour. “That rumour was true, then? Witches stealing the bodies of their foes?”

“It’s not like that,” I said, recalling the propaganda he’d told me about. “I can control the body, but… well, it’s more like working a puppet than becoming that person. And it’s temporary.”

“It’s cold-path, then?” Osili asked.

“Like so much of the craft,” I said, “it’s hot-path only in malice. I’ve only ever used it for defence, to send away intruders. And only a few times.”

Osili nodded, staring into his tea. “Intruders,” he murmured. “Like me.”

***

Usually, the witch hunters didn’t make it far past the perimeter. If the charmed wildlife didn’t deter them, the glyphs of misdirection usually did, and they’d find themselves missing the cottage completely. But every so often, perhaps once every two or three years, someone would come prepared and reach my doorstep. Luckily for me, those who swallowed the Third Temple propaganda hard enough to go hunting for me were often terribly weak-willed. The intruders would remember my house, my front door, perhaps a split second of my face, and then their bodies turning on them and frogmarching them into the river. And if they were stubborn enough to come looking for me again, they’d find only an empty clearing; my cottage and I would be long gone by then, re-emerging from the soil elsewhere in the woods.

I hadn’t done that to Osili when he’d come calling, though. I’d seen in his jittering, unfocused eyes, his steel-tight jaw, and his shaking grip on the crossbow stock, that his heart wasn’t in the mission. But, absent those clues, I’d still have known, because no witch hunter with a genuine determination to kill me would have _knocked_.

He’d probably been primed to expect a more villainous figure, a cackling, scantily clad demon-lady with purple skin and a thousand teeth, sowing dark magic into the world like dandelion seeds on the wind. And instead he got me, a weathered, thatch-haired androgyne in a shapeless robe. The darkest thing about me was the circles around my eyes.

His first two words to me had been “I’m sorry”, as had most of the next five hundred. I’d gently taken the crossbow off him, snapped it in half with a click of my fingers, and invited him in for tea. I told myself I’d look after him for a few weeks – I couldn’t bear to send him away and straight back into the arms of the Third Temple – and in that brief time he proved himself both remarkably open-minded and a very good assistant. Weeks turned into months, and now it had been almost a year. It was hard to trace the exact moment we’d fallen in love, because neither of us had said it yet, but there was no other word for what we shared now.

***

We finished our tea and broth in short order, and I stepped outside to renew the wards and gather a few herbs that were finally coming into season. Osili was already in bed when I came back, reading a botanical manual we’d been given by a lost naturalist in exchange for healing his snakebites. As the Third Temple’s grip on his mind had faded, he’d replaced his nightly scripture readings with any other text he could get his hands on, making labyrinthine annotations in compact handwriting. I shrugged off my robe and slipped in beside him.

“Shall I read to you, Bracken?” he asked.

“Please,” I said.

I couldn’t read Oradic script – even if I’d had the opportunity to learn, I hadn’t much of a head for letters – but Osili loved reading to me, and I loved listening. Occasionally, though, I couldn’t help but interrupt.

“Blinkshade should be fine to touch.”

Osili turned to me, quizzical. “Says here…” He cleared his throat and adopted his Reading Voice, grave and subtly rhythmic like the sermons he’d grown up listening to. “Mere skin contact with blinkshade can cause dizziness and hallucinations. It should be manipulated only with a glove of sturdy leather.”

I shook my head. “I see why they think so,” I said, “but if touching blinkshade does that to you, it’s blighted. The pure stuff is safe to handle. Long as you don’t eat it, of course.”

Osili reached for his pencil and scratched in a neat little addendum next to the offending passage, muttering the words aloud as he wrote them. I loved watching him write. His hands were strong, firm, a warrior’s hands, but so very deft when he focused on them.

Of course, from there, my thoughts drifted to what else he could do with those hands, and that sunk my spirits a little.

I’d been lucky to catch Osili when I did, when his mind was already seeded with questions and doubts; he’d been ready to throw off the doctrine and embrace a broader, kinder view of the world, and he’d just needed a little push to start him on the road to recovery. But, in a few places, the conditioning ran deeper. He still had difficulty with a few things the Third Temple had declared taboo, like eating outside a set meal schedule and sleeping through the night – he still woke up for the midnight prayer sessions he no longer attended, more often than not. And then there was the big one: sex.

He knew about it, of course. Not even the propaganda machine had kept the pressures of his own biology hidden from him, and he’d read plenty about it. He masturbated, he watched me masturbate, and he even cracked the occasional dirty joke nowadays, always with a storm of apologies and was-that-okays afterwards. But he’d had the innate sinfulness of “earthly congress” drilled into him so severely that he couldn’t bring himself to touch me, or to let me touch him. However much he desired me, however much I excited him, the mental block was ironclad.

And that was a shame, because I wanted Osili more acutely than anyone I’d ever known, and I knew he felt the same way. We’d tried all sorts of workarounds, hoping to trick his conditioning into leaving us alone, but nothing had stuck.

I realised he was halfway down the next page and tried to perk up, but he’d noticed me lost in my thoughts. “Are you alright, Bracken?” he asked.

“Yeah.” I paused. “No. I want you, and it’s not fucking fair.”

I regretted it the moment I said it. I was trying to blame the conditioning, not him, but I knew he wasn’t going to take it that way. But, instead of spiralling into another meltdown, Osili was quiet, passive, staring into the middle distance.

“I’m sorry,” I ventured.

He snapped the book shut. “You needn’t be,” he said. “I think I know something that’ll work.”

I suppressed a sigh of resignation. I was starting to lose hope that we’d ever find a way past it, but I wanted to hear him out, at least. “Tell me more,” I said.

“We were talking about it earlier,” said Osili, giving me a meaningful look.

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“This is why I asked you,” said Osili. “About possession.”

A few pieces snapped into place in my head, and I knew exactly what he was proposing. “Possessing you?” I shook my head. “No. No. I couldn’t do that. You wouldn’t even be in control, I’d be using you! I couldn’t –”

“But it’s cold-path,” said Osili evenly. “It’s cold-path if it’s not in malice. And this would be, well, the opposite.”

I started a few different sentences before settling on one. “Not everything is that clear-cut, Sil. Cold-path and hot-path, it’s not the same thing as kind and cruel.”

“And this would be kind!” He wasn’t shouting, but his voice was a hair above its normal, careful tone, and I heard it drop before he’d even finished speaking. “This would be kind,” he repeated, sounding altogether less sure of it.

“I’m sorry, Sil,” I said. “Using my craft like that… I don’t think it would feel right.”

“I understand,” said Osili. “I’m sorry, Bracken.” He rolled over and snuffed the candle at his side of the bed. “Goodnight.”

Only one apology, I thought, as I put out my own candle and tried to steal back some of the blankets he’d wrapped himself up in. I didn’t know whether to call that an improvement or a disaster.


End file.
